Tax
Taxes are collected from the citizens of your city and outposts at an hourly rate, and are set as a percentage of your maximum housing capacity. Taxes are needed to provide you with gold which is used mainly for research, hiring Generals, and trade. Having higher taxes will make your citizens unhappy and cause them to leave(one reason for less idle population), whilst having lower taxes will make citizens happier causing people to live in your city. The population reflects the amount of taxes and higher taxes mean less people you can train. Setting taxes to 0 allows you train your maximum idle population as troops. This means that you have your full capacity minus the laborers and trainees left to train as troops. Considering that gold becomes more or less useless past the beginning of the game, it is generally useful to keep taxes at zero (or, if you've built a theater, slightly higher than that), so you can keep an eye on your Idle Population. 'Tax Rate' Your tax rate will affect your gold income and your current population since the happier citizens are, the more that will stay in your city. Your citizen's happiness = 100 - tax rate + (theatre level * 2). As long as you don't need idle citizens for training your army you can set taxes at 50% in order to earn the most gold. This is generally discontinued after you begin attacking other players for gold. Hourly gold rate = home capacity x happiness x tax rate You can change the tax rate by clicking on your fortress, clicking on the box with a percentage sign, typing in a number and then clicking 'change tax rate'. One recommended strategy is that you put your tax rate up to 50% when not training - for maximum gold income - then put tax rate to 0% when you want to train. This maximizes your pool of available citizens. Once you have used the desired amount of your idol population, put the tax rate back to 50%. 'Optimal Tax Rate' The optimal tax rate is achieved when your happiness is equal to your tax rate. 'To do this, check your happiness percentage and set that as your tax rate. Then find the mean of the two percentages (add the happiness and tax rate together then divide that by 2) and your tax rate and happiness percentage will be equal. As you continually upgrade your theatre, repeat this and you will obtain the '''best tax-to-citizen ratio, earning you the most gold, '''assuming you do not need idle citizens. (laffer curve) It can also be calculated in this way; 50% plus the level of your theatre. (100 + HappinesFromTheater) / 2. 'Theater This building increases the happiness in your city, allowing you to tax citizens higher than you usually would. So if you can normally tax them at 50% for the Optimal Tax Rate, with the theater you will be able to raise it past 50% without losing the population. It can raise happines up to 25% (level 10). This is a controversial building though, because it is only useful during the first 1-3 weeks to the average player. Because most players get more than enough gold from other players, they will not need to tax citizens at all... allowing for more population for troops. Therefore '''''the theatre is not that important. Category:Browse Category:General Gameplay Category:Guides Category:City